“Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.”

– Inigo Montoya

Yesterday, the mayor of New Orleans had his little moment in the sun as he asked the city council to remove four 19th century statues and monuments from public places – the Robert E. Lee statue from Lee Circle, which will presumably be renamed, the Jefferson Davis statue, the PGT Beauregard statue and the Liberty Monument.

Landrieu also demanded that the road named for Jefferson Davis be renamed for Norman Francis, the longtime chancellor at Xavier University, despite the fact that Francis isn’t dead yet and it’s against the law to name a street in Louisiana for a living person.

And once he opened the door to a purge of the city’s history, idiocies tumbled out like basketballs. There were street names which needed to go, names of schools, other statues – one moron even demanded the city do away with the fleur de lis, New Orleans’ ubiquitous cultural symbol, because runaway slaves used to be branded with it.

They want the statue of E.D. White, Louisiana’s only Supreme Court justice, torn down from the state Supreme Court building in the French Quarter. They want John McDonogh’s name scrubbed from schools in the city because he was a slaveowner, despite the fact that McDonogh systematically educated and freed his slaves and essentially built the New Orleans public school system with his own money.

They even want to scrub references to Iberville, the French founder of the city, because he trafficked in slaves.

You’d say it was a shocking display of historiphobia, but how can you be shocked at this point? This isn’t just a New Orleans thing, it’s everywhere. There is a full-on attempt to purge every historical reference to everything having to do with the confederacy and historic Southern culture because it might make some members of society feel bad.

And therefore, until the statue comes down at Lee Circle, it will be vandalized and collections of race-baiting ne’er-do-wells will show up to burn flags in front of it.

And the Times-Picayune’s atrocious columnist Jarvis DeBerry will go on agitating for the destruction of the city’s history and that of the South until there is nothing left, because racial division is the only thing DeBerry can write about. In that, he has to be considered the most racist “newsman” in Louisiana since the execrable Henry J. Hearsey, who spent the post-Civil War years filling the pages of the New Orleans Daily Democrat and later the New Orleans Daily States with brutal screeds against blacks and Yankee carpetbaggers.

Hearsey’s writings contributed to the Robert Charles riots in New Orleans. Lord knows what DeBerry’s poison pen will bring on.

I’ll admit to a certain conflict in defending monuments to Davis and the others. After all, the entire confederate enterprise was a product of the Democrat Party, which is as evil today as it was then in the sense that Democrats have always had the forcible appropriation of one man’s labor for another’s benefit as a central tenet of their political belief, and the legacy of the Civil War, segregation and Jim Crow only really changed that philosophy in the sense of abiding by what was possible. Meaning that we’ve seen a change from slavery, in which black people were forced to labor for the benefit of a white planter class, to segregation, in which black people were forced to labor at subsistence wages for the benefit mostly of a white business class, and now to welfare, where the middle class is forced to surrender the fruits of its labor in order to subsidize a class of people who don’t work so that those people are motivated to do the bidding of a mostly-white political class.

As far as I’m concerned there is something delicious in that political class attacking the proprietors of the former exploitative system – in the knowledge that what goes around comes around.

Still, there was merit in the men Landrieu and the rest of his mob want to exorcise from memory (and Landrieu is full of shit when he says he wants them remembered but not revered). Robert E. Lee, as we’ve discussed within these pages, was a man of far more virtue than the seedy, pandering current mayor of New Orleans. So was P.G.T. Beauregard. And even if their Civil War exploits should permanently tar them as villains they’re still unquestionably historical figures who played a major part in the history of New Orleans. Beauregard may have been the greatest military leader Louisiana has ever produced. Davis died in New Orleans; his funeral was one of the most heavily attended in the city’s history. And without Lee’s efforts at bringing the South and North together after the war it’s entirely possible that the South would have remained a battlefield for decades longer.

So their stories ought to be remembered. New Orleans is worse off for expunging them from public view. And Landrieu, whose pandering to the worst elements of the social justice mob, will rightly be remembered as New Orleans’ version of the ISIS thugs destroying historical artifacts at Mosul and Palmyra.

OTHER STUFF

– Last night we had a post on another confederate flag controversy – the one the Democrats staged on the House floor on Capitol Hill. That’s a distraction aimed at stopping passage of an appropriations bill that would pop the EPA’s funding and stop it from implementing the idiotic Waters of the U.S. regulations and the climate change policy sure to inflate everybody’s electric bill.

But what we neglected to mention was the comic idiocy of their presentation. A picture…

Seems like an awful lot of stars on that flag, no?

The confederate battle flag has 13 stars on it, not 17. And the clowns using that representation as a prop while holding forth about how much damage it would do to race relations were the descendants of confederate soldiers to plant flags at their gravesites in Vicksburg and Andersonville once a year – Reps. James Clyburn (S.C.), Al Green (Texas), Keith Ellison (Minn.), David Cicilline (R.I.), Eric Swalwell (Calif.), Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.), Sheila Jackson Lee (Texas) and Terri Sewell (Ala.) – don’t even know what they’re bitching about. None of them even bothered to notice they were posturing next to the wrong flag.

It’s impossible to respect these people. Their ridiculous overreaches, their infantile whining and excuse-making, their servile allegiance to a destructive economic philosophy and their never-ending corruption makes them beneath contempt.

If we had a better class of people representing mostly-black communities, it would be so much easier to move beyond the racial problems of the past.

– Did you hear that Al Sharpton is the one behind this business of trying to pressure Kid Rock into dropping the confederate flag? Sharpton’s gang of minions went so far as to protest outside a museum in Detroit that Kid Rock had funded, demanding that he either drop the flag or have his name pulled off the wing of the museum he’d donated to.

Kid Rock’s response was, essentially, that Sharpton could kiss his ass.

What this calls for is a song. Kid Rock ought to write something about what a turd Al Sharpton is and how he can do something anatomically impossible. Make it as mean and derisive as possible, record it, and put it out on iTunes as soon as is practicable.

I’ll guarantee it goes to #1 if it’s remotely decent. And then Kid Rock can donate even more of the proceeds to that museum.

– A quote from Pat Buchanan, in a must-read column yesterday:

“A secession of the heart has already taken place in America, and a secession, not of states, but of people from one another, caused by divisions on social, moral, cultural and political views and values, is taking place.”

Victor Davis Hanson warns that regular folks are just going to stop obeying the law and society will begin breaking down like it has in Greece, where part of the fiscal nightmares of that government comes from the fact that people just dodge paying their taxes, and that’s of a piece with lots of different examples of lawlessness (littering, flagrant violations of traffic laws, rampant graft and bribery, and so on). I think to a large extent that’s true; as Buchanan says in his column Americans with traditional views on culture and society are going to become more and more disengaged in a post-Christian, post-Enlightenment America and simply refuse to be governed by the Left.

But that’s OK. As we’ve seen in our cities, the Left is perfectly happy to rule over a ruin.

– You should watch this. It explains a lot.

–  “People should, and do, trust me.

“And by the way, I’ve never had a subpoena.

“[Errrrr]”

– We’d have one less problem without Ariana Grande.

– Another must-read. People need to understand what the Obama administration is doing. They’re going to use Section 8 to move poor people – of all kinds of ethnicities, this isn’t really about race – into your neighborhood. And by doing so they will destroy your property values and dilute your voting strength in our own community. If you live in the suburbs they’re going to defeat the entire purpose of your decision to live there.

83 percent of Americans think this is not the proper role for the federal government, but they’re going to do it anyway.

AFFH is easily one of President Obama’s most radical initiatives, on a par with Obamacare in its transformative potential. In effect, AFFH gives the federal government a lever to re-engineer nearly every American neighborhood — imposing a preferred racial and ethnic composition, densifying housing, transportation, and business development in suburb and city alike, and weakening or casting aside the authority of local governments over core responsibilities, from zoning to transportation to education. Not only the policy but the political implications are immense — at the presidential, congressional, state, and local levels.

It is a scandal that the mainstream press has largely refused to report on AFFH until the day of its final release. The rule has been out in preliminary form for two years, and well before that the Obama administration’s transformative aims in urban/suburban policy were evident. Three years ago, when I wrote about Obama’s policy blueprint in Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, the administration’s efforts to keep this issue under the radar were evident. Only last month, an admission of the stealth relied on by advocates to advance this initiative was caught on video.

– There used to be a saying about people lacking the gift of persuasion: “couldn’t sell p____y to a troop train.” I think that applies to Jeb Bush, whose messaging is just  awful. I know his statement about how people should be working longer hours if we’re going to grow the economy was mischaracterized; I get that. But mischaracterizing the statements of your opponent to make him look bad is what you do in politics, and Bush had to know that was going to happen.

When you’re trying to say there are too many people stuck in part-time work who need to be in full-time jobs, and too many people who aren’t working at all, then SAY THAT, dammit. Don’t allow yourself to be dragged into the muck by using imprecise language.

Jeb constantly puts himself in this position. He’s a terrible candidate, and it’s not a surprise Trump has jumped him. When Trump fades, it will be somebody else who vaults over Bush into the lead – Rubio, or Walker, or even Cruz. The fact that Jeb has raised $100 million merely shows you precisely how dumb the GOP’s donors can be. Why would you invest that much money in a candidate so prone to gaffes and so lacking in public appeal?

– Finally, closer to home Ryan Heck’s campaign for the open House seat in District 69 got a nice boost yesterday when Steve Maher, a local architect of some repute whose name had been throw around quite a bit as a potential opponent to Heck, endorsed him. Assuming that sets the field, Heck is now a pretty decent favorite for the seat against two other candidates – James Bullman, a trial lawyer running as a Democrat, and Paula Davis, a former Deputy Commissioner of Insurance who’s being endorsed by Erick Ponti, the tax-raising former incumbent in that seat who’s now the Executive Director of the Louisiana Asphalt Pavement Association.

We want to make clear, because we initially had this wrong, that the Paula Davis in this race isn’t the Paula Davis who works as a social worker with Catholic Charities. There shouldn’t be any confusion about that – if we caused any, we apologize.